


Dress Code

by arcanemoody



Category: Pacific Rim (Movies)
Genre: Androgyne Newt, Clothing, Gay Male Character, Gender Identity, Gender Issues, Implied Relationships, M/M, Newton Geiszler Recovery Arc, Nonbinary Character, Pansexual Character, Past Abuse, Post-Movie: Pacific Rim: Uprising (2018), Trans Newton Geiszler
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-05
Updated: 2020-10-05
Packaged: 2021-03-07 23:08:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,040
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26841919
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arcanemoody/pseuds/arcanemoody
Summary: Three weeks after his rescue from the pre-cursors, Newt needs new clothes.
Relationships: Newton Geiszler/Hermann Gottlieb
Comments: 4
Kudos: 50





	Dress Code

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this for a Trans/GNC Newmann zine that was eventually back-burnered. It's been sitting on my Google drive for more than a year. I hope you like it!

Newton Geiszler was used to dirty looks from people he didn’t know. People side-eyeing the way he dressed was an ancient pattern of engagement he hadn’t missed, even if was preferable to the overt glares and devastated looks in the weeks after his recovery. Lately, it was because of the too-large cardigans and collared shirts borrowed from his drift partner. 

The extra yardage had been tolerable for the first several weeks, because Hermann’s smell was on his hands and his neck and in his head, overwhelming him for the first time in ten years... Now, it just felt ungainly. The amused looks from the teenage cadets didn’t help.

“Would you be happier in a flight suit?” one of them asked.

“I’d be happier in a dress,” he replied. At least then the extra fabric would flow out beside him like a pair of wings or a set of tentacles. 

Something inside had never quite aligned with the boxes on his various forms. He'd been fortunate enough to have the father that he did, who dared to ask him throughout the years: “Were you put here to make people more comfortable?”

Given his family history and auspicious start, he was inclined to say "no."

It was a gift, that question. Tragically lop-sided parental wisdom. The cooperative three-person parenting plan had evaporated around '95: Monica had gotten the role of Titania in _A Midsummer Night's Dream_ and Newton had walked out of the bathroom in their Kreuzberg apartment dressed in one of her lace chemises and a pair of steel-toed boots. Enough was enough, apparently.

Dad and Ilia had been more understanding and continued to be more understanding than his peers, school officials, the occasional cashier that glared at the bracelets stacked up Newt’s arms or the manic panic pink streaks in his hair. 

“Were you raised as a girl?” 

He hadn't been raised as anything, truly. 'Girl' would have been a less surprising label than 'child prodigy' (he'd happily told counselors, TAs, and the occasional reporter where they could shove thatlabel). He'd found a word that fit best when he was still too short to reach the lab table (androgyne; noun: simulataneously masculine and feminine; tentative or absent fixed gender). The ones that rolled with it were allowed to get close to him. Those were the people he knew he could trust enough to drop the bravado, who would have his back when he marched up the aisle to collect his third pHd with a silk halter dress under his gown. 

It was good enough for Iggy Pop and it swayed when he walked.

As he got older, everything was filtered through the lens of what would be tolerated; accepted, if not embraced. Attraction was moot when he was such a bundle of contradictory impulses, topped off with what he was repeatedly told to be an “immature” temperament. Unfixed, intemporal. Some of his more hateful colleagues suggested that if Newt wasn’t sure what gender _he_ was, it was no wonder he would sleep with anyone that grabbed him from a party or the crowd at a rock show. That hurt. And Newt did what he always did when something hurt: he leaned into it. Refuge in audacity. Yes, he would have whoever would lower themselves to have _him._ So what? (Except for how, quite often, that meant he was alone). 

After San Francisco and Trespasser, he would stay alone. Apart from twice-weekly letters from across the Atlantic, supporting and expanding on his theories, the shadow of potential, of something momentous in between those words… he allowed himself to think that he might never be alone again. 

In a sense, he was correct.

Objectively speaking, on a global scale, the precursors were far worse than any of the assholes at MIT or the higher ranks of the PPDC. On a personal scale, in terms of comprehending gender and gender presentation, Newt could honestly say they were about the same. Genocidal colonizers and squirmy martinets clinging to their sacred masculine ideals in a world that was days from crumbling into dust. He wasn’t surprised that the aliens who hijacked his mind plumbed his memories of those men and their contemporary counterparts at Shao Industries to blend in. “Man-shaped Meat-Sack needs man-shaped sack cloths.” 

The first thing Newt had done when the last drift with Hermann brought him screaming to the surface was shred the tailored shirt like a straightjacket, the stiff waistcoat, the too-large trousers and too-tight shoes. A violent rebirth that left him shaking in Hermann’s arms while Liwen Shao held his hand and injected midazolam into his neck. 

Three weeks later, he still didn’t recognize himself in the mirror. 

Which was how he found himself in the Shatterdome's base surplus after hours, one of the few floors he was allowed to roam unsupervised (with clearance from a still recovering Marshall Mori); staring at rows and rows of J-tech coveralls, engineering gear, cast-offs and block pieces begging for modification -- a bedazzler or some colorful embroidery, some political badges or patches. He wondered if the place had always been this big; if he’d failed to notice because he was elbow deep in kaiju viscera and the long hours limited his wardrobe to three white oxford shirts and three pairs of skinny jeans. A tie at the marshall’s insistence -- for formality rather than any adherence to gender binary.

The sound of familiar footsteps on the concrete floor -- and the familiar presence that preceded it -- made him smile without looking up.

 _Fancy a new wardrobe?_ Hermann's tone was light for the circumstances, even inside his head. 

"My beeper doesn't go with anything in your closet." He held his wrist up where the tracker sat, bulky and flashing a dull green light. Their little compromise with the council -- house arrest at the Moyulan Shatterdome, supervised movements on certain floors, all communications tracked and monitored pending further medical tests to confirm the lack of a third voice in his head.

"Not much does, I’m afraid,” Hermann smiled, moving to stand flush at his side. Close, intimate, supportive. No such thing as ‘too close’ ever again. “Are you looking for something in a brighter color?"

"It's not the colors I have to worry about. It's texture -- I’m pretty sure those bastards ruined silk for me."

"Well, I doubt we’ll find any of that down here. Are wool and linen still all right, sensory wise?"  
  
Newt made a show of tucking his face into the oversized jumper, taking a deep breath of his partner’s cologne, citrus mint soap, a hint of alcohol from the lab, gazed up at his partner from the stretched collar.  
  
“It should get me to the end of the day,” he concluded.  
  
"How about khaki and leather?"  
  
"Oh, _Dr. Gottlieb_ ,” he gasped, savoring the heat that flooded his own cheeks as well as Hermann’s. “Leather I can do. For everything else, I may need some sewing needles."  
  
"I’ve got a portable sewing machine in our quarters."  
  
That gave Newton pause. "Did you sew _before_?"  
  
"No,” Hermann smiled. “But I have in the years since. I'm told I have a deft hand for it -- Klaus asked for a 'kaiju princess' dress for their last birthday."  
  
The sound that emanated from Newt's throat was somewhere between a gasp and a laugh, tinged with awe, chest fluttering.  
  
"Do I need to hit Karla up for pictures?" One more privilege he’d been tentatively allowed, pending review of his ongoing medical appointments and the looming threat of yet another debriefing. He felt bad for the LOCCENT tech forced to monitor his last video chat with Dad and Ilia, all three of them in tears intermittently for two and a half hours.  
  
"I have some. All the same, I know she and Vanessa would love to hear from you," Hermann replied, eyes shining.  
  
The relationship between Hermann and his siblings had always impressed Newt, particularly the closeness with his sister and her wife; having survived the oversight of a tyrannical parent, then a professional, paramilitary system designed to root out any extraordinary, self-directed traits that couldn’t be easily commodified. For many years, he’d found it easier to openly admire Karla than her prickly brother -- the warm professional and personal interactions with the former were easier to deal with than the secreted, glowing spark he felt for the latter. Now, with seven drifts and a few weeks’ recovery between him and annihilation... it was different.  
  
"Maybe. Later?” he said, grabbing for explanations like dangling threads. “I need new clothes first. Hermann, I don't look like me. I don't... _feel like me_ . Yet."  
  
"Okay. Then we’ll focus on that for now." 

\--

The pieces they ended up grabbing were a good start to a few outfits: some t-shirts, a pair of boots that fit, some lightweight button-ups in LOCCENT pale blue, a leather bomber jacket in a charcoal gray with fur trim on the hood. The quilted lining did a good job of concealing how thin Newt had gotten, restoring an illusion of softness he was determined to realize through the power of doughnuts and bubble tea over the coming months. 

Finally, perhaps his greatest find: a mid-length uniform skirt secreted behind two racks of small flight suits -- spotted only when Newt noticed the clothespins projecting from the top of the hanger. Wool, dark blue serge, gentle flare, elastic waistband in place of a zipper. The lightness in his chest spread to Hermann, who helped him wordlessly strip out of the too-long trousers and step into the skirt.  
  
_We probably ought to wash these first._ A superficial protest considering Hermann was already thumbing mother of pearl buttons open down to the bottom of the placket, chilled fingers pushing the shirt off his shoulders and down Newt’s arms.  
_  
Fuck it._

 _Agreed._  
  
The shiver that ran through him was multilayered as Hermann continued to help him dress, memories and sensations overlapping; three weeks of cohabitation, seven drifts, and 20 years between them. No such thing as too close.  
  
“How does that feel?” Hermann asked, taking both his hands when they were finished, glancing down at the finished product.

His answer was, similarly, multilayered.

“I saw you looking at me that day,” he said, and they both knew what he meant. Stockholm. 2016. Their rendezvous at the conference on kaiju biology and drift physics for coastal protection. “My shirt. And the patches on my jacket. I thought you... “ The words stalled in his throat as the drift connection filled in the gap.

Newt had seen Hermann’s flinch and felt his brain seize up in a way that hadn’t happened since he was fifteen. The kaiju scales embroidered on his shirt collar, the silver glitter polish on his fingernails, the pansexual and androgyne patches on his shoulders had made him… _itchy_. Even with key details revealed in their letters, along with a polaroid of him at the 2012 Geneva climate conference wearing floral Doc Martens and fishnets. 

It was too much, _Newt_ was too much, for a guy who was presenting as male from 1941. That hurt. It _hurt_... 

“...but that wasn’t it at all, was it?”  
  
“I thought you looked _lovely_ ,” Hermann whispered, steadfast. “You were irreverent in your letters. You knew that you were right and it didn’t matter what ten people above you said on the matter. I admired that and I took _great satisfaction_ in your accomplishments. And your person. Seeing you was overwhelming. I felt… small when we were in the same place. Arguing with you put us on an equal plane.”

“I _do_ like arguing with you,” Newt conceded, smiling.

“You can’t go to extreme lengths to prove me wrong.”

“I know. The extreme lengths that proved you right were worse.”

The whole world knew exactly how much worse. For ten years, straightjacketed, tapping out an SOS any way he could, over and over, hoping it would get through to Hermann, to Mako, to _anyone_. It had gotten through, in the end, too late for Sydney and Tokyo, but not for Newt and not for them.

“Shall I walk you home?” Hermann asked, lips grazing over his. A promise.  
  
Walking on Hermann’s arm back to their shared quarters, with his new skirt swishing around his knees, Newt almost felt like himself.


End file.
